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Spectating at London 2012: Paralympics Closing Ceremony

My ticket for the London 2012 Paralympics Closing Ceremony may be the best £100 I’ve ever spent. I can’t really explain how good this night was. Good company, amazing performances, a feel of celebration and appropriate closure, and the best send-off to an incredible summer. If I can’t explain it in written form, I can come a little closer with photos.

Irritatingly, I don’t have access to the camera data at present – it seems something has gone wrong in the export from RAW to jpg. But I was using my 70-300mm lens for most photos with the exception of a few which I reverted to 18-55mm to get the whole stadium in. Also, please click on the images for their bigger versions; if any photos are going to look better when bigger, they are these.

The stadium was quite magical in making you feel very close to everything going on and yet when you looked at the crowd it seemed enormous.

There was a parade of some strange animalistic steampunk… things. I haven’t watched the TV footage yet (I know), so I have no idea what the context was.

2 thoughts on “Spectating at London 2012: Paralympics Closing Ceremony”

To be honest, I was a little underwhelmed by the Paralympics ceremonies. They seemed a bit unfocussed and conceptually abstract compared to the ceremonies of the Olympic Games. I suppose it wasn’t helped by Channel 4’s coverage which was not on par with the Beeb’s coverage of the Games, with Krishnan Guru-Murthy talking all the time. I think part of the problem is he felt the need to explain some of the more abstract ideas. There was too much Coldplay too.

These are some really nice shots, I know shooting in conditions like this (little control over position, elbow to elbow with strangers, and unusual lighting conditions) and you’ve got some gems in here. I especially love the final shots, I love the light beams and the fireworks in the background.

The first shot too is really nice – is that taken at 18mm? It seems to capture so much of the arena it looks wider than I’d expect from an 18mm lens.

I’m still to watch the television footage of this ceremony, it will be interesting to see how it compared to being there in terms of what the editors chose to focus on. There was so much going on that I suspect they had to be selective and so whilst we saw many things going on to the background music from Coldplay, I am guessing that C4 chose to make it a Coldplay concert with some background acts.

Interestingly, some of the iphone photos I took of the stadium as a whole with fireworks etc. came out better than these; I think it was mostly an accident of timing more than anything else.

First one was 18mm, yep. The stadium is… well, magical in how it appears. But in this case, it may be because we were in what was as close to a corner as you could get, so more was viewable at a wide angle. If that makes sense.